Today we mourn and pray for our brothers and sisters in France—for those who lost loved ones in yesterday’s terror attacks, and for the millions of French citizens who must now try to process this brutality.

One of the oldest and toughest challenges for Christians is finding a way to understand the existence of terrible evil in a world that is ruled by a loving, all-powerful God. It’s not an easy question to answer—if it were, we wouldn’t be struggling with it thousands of years after Christ—but the Bible does offer hope in the face of violence and evil.

We’ve talked about terror and the question of evil here in relation to terror attacks in past years. Most of those reflections are still relevant today in the wake of the Paris attacks; if these latest terror attacks have you wondering why a loving God could let this happen, take a few minutes to read through these reflections:

• Why Does God Allow Tragedy and Suffering?
• What Does the Bible Say About Religious Extremism?
• What Does the Bible Say About Violence?

There are many Bible passages that talk about evil and suffering; one of the best-known is Romans 8, which reads in part:

The sufferings we have now are nothing compared to the great glory that will be shown to us. Everything God made is waiting with excitement for God to show his children’s glory completely. Everything God made was changed to become useless, not by its own wish but because God wanted it and because all along there was this hope: that everything God made would be set free from ruin to have the freedom and glory that belong to God’s children.

We know that everything God made has been waiting until now in pain, like a woman ready to give birth. Not only the world, but we also have been waiting with pain inside us. We have the Spirit as the first part of God’s promise. So we are waiting for God to finish making us his own children, which means our bodies will be made free. We were saved, and we have this hope. If we see what we are waiting for, that is not really hope. People do not hope for something they already have. But we are hoping for something we do not have yet, and we are waiting for it patiently. — Romans 8:18-25

We invite you to spend this weekend in prayer for our brothers and sisters in France. May God comfort the survivors, may He grant safety to police and rescue workers, and may the church of Jesus Christ be a beacon of hope for those overwhelmed by sorrow.